Based on some posts on the XFS mailing list archives, there's reason to believe that a new version of XFS would be rolled for 2.4.19. These posts are about a month old however. But seeing as that a large percentage of gentoo users use gentoo-sources 2.4.19-r7 (gentoo-stats page) a new version of XFS would greatly be appreciated before a new gentoo-sources ebuild is availiable

I'm pretty new to gentoo, so I'm not exactly sure how to go about emerging the kernel. I'm using XFS on both /boot as well as /
So when I performed the bootstrap, I used xfs-sources to compile the kernel. Now that 2.4.19 came out, I was going to emerge xfs-sources again. So I emerged rsync and looked in the xfs-sources directory, only to find that there wasn't a 2.4.19 entry... just 2.4.18.
What do I do? I looked in the gentoo-sources directory and saw the 2.4.19 entry, nano'ed it and saw mention of XFS. Does this mean that I can now use gentoo-sources instead of xfs-sources?
TIA
Brad_________________Get Firefox!

Since XFS support is *not* included in the "vanilla" (default) version of kernel, you must use a patched kernel. Gentoo offers 3 patched kernels that support XFS: xfs-sources, gentoo-sources and mjc-sources. None of these have been updated to use the 2.4.19 release kernel, but are based on 2.4.18 or 2.4.19-pre. If you want to run 2.4.19 release w/ XFS, you can install the vanilla 2.4.19 and patch it manually, or just wait for the fine Gentoo developers to release a new version of xfs-sources, mjc-sources or gentoo-sources respectively ;)

As I write this, the latest xfs kernels are based on:
xfs-sources:2.4.18
gentoo-sources: 2.4.19-pre7
mjc-sources: 2.4.19-rc1

The Gentoo dev team constantly blows my mind with how fast they release new ebuilds. I'll bet we'll see some new kernels soon ;)

What are the difference between all the different kernels btw? What exactly got patched into the gentoo-sources? (ACPI, XFS.. anything else?)

While I'm at it, what's the difference between the new vanilla kernel and the 2.4.19-pre that's been out a while?

The vanilla kernel is the base - it contains no patches or mods. Although it is very stable, it is missing someof the newer technologies and is usually not fully optimized. Linux 2.4.19-pre7-ac2 contains a bunch of pre-applied patches that add new functionality, changes behaviors and optimizations. most patches are authored by kernel development members (alan cox et. al). Gentoo developers do not write patches for the kernel. The current gentoo source is a normal vanilla kernel with alan cox's pre-7 ac2 patch applied (hence the name 2.4.19-pre7-ac2), as well as some usefull utility scripts added by gentoo.
You can download and apply patches that you want to the vanilla kernel to better tailor the kernel to your system. Do a google search for "linux patch archive". it should return a site that hosts most if not all of the currently released patches that you can download. There is also a little "how-to" explaining how to use the patch tool. Be carefull, as some patches are more experimental than others.